Original Article: Criticizing Lin and Kong
(2010-06-26 10:49:17)
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Original Article: Criticizing Lin and Kong
When the Lin Biao incident happened, I just started my primary school.
I was born and grown up in a village in Northeast China. We had no access to official media, and one of the only sources of information was my next house neighbour. Some people would gather there after dinner to chat and smoke. One evening my grandma told my grandpa: People next door said that Lin Biao escaped to Russia, and his daughter Lin Dou reported it to the authorities.
A few weeks later, in a cold winter evening when we students were on winter vacation, I saw four big Chinese characters on four pieces of red paper reading “Criticizing Lin and Kong”on the wall on the school building.
I thought that Lin deserved the criticism, since he was a traitor to the revolution. But who would Kong be? There was only one family in my village with a family name of Kong. It did not seem that they were even related. Later I heard that it might be about the second child of the Kong Family … …
When the school started in the spring, the school authorities prepared for the students serial posters drawn in black ink on big pieces of crude paper about Kong’s bad deed many, many, many years ago. Then I knew that this event was not related to the Kong family in the village.
Then the criticizing moments started, the students and teachers were told to write criticizing articles to read in front of the classes, some were selected to read in front of the whole school. At the beginning, I was wondering why the kids of the leaders of the production brigades and party secretaries wrote better articles than I did. Soon I found that they had access to newspapers and radio broadcasts. Once I got some newspaper as oil bottle wrapping, I could copy the contents too, and my article was considered one of the best in school.
And I found that the Confucian ideas were not that bad or might not be wrong at all. I dared not to say that to anyone. I though that some of the phrases need to memorized. While Lin Biao was a counter-revolutionist, what was wrong with “Restrain to Achieve You Goal”? When in many games after school, without restraint to myself, big kids would beat me up.